The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) Brad Magnarella (ink book reader txt) 📖

At least the apartment was quiet, everyone probably still asleep.

I drew the sheets from my legs. Evidently, I’d managed to retain my boxers and a single gray sock. That didn’t always happen. Oh, wait. I looked again. The sock wasn’t mine.

Time to go.

I stood and began shuffling around in search of my clothes and cane. My goal was to get at least ten blocks away before anyone awakened. Lord only knew what Thelonious had gotten up to last—

“Morning,” a woman’s voice said.

I wheeled to find pink spikes of hair jutting from a narrow tube of bedding at the mattress’s far side. The hair framed a face that, despite its resting surliness and dozens of painful-looking piercings, possessed a hard beauty.

My cheeks burned with blood. Did we…? Had we…?

She must have read my panic. “Relax.” Thin, tattoo-stained arms emerged from the sheets and stretched overhead. She continued to speak as she yawned. “I don’t do charity cases.”

I felt my brow furrow. “Charity?”

She smacked on the last of her yawn. “I did fix your eye, though.”

My hand floated to where the shrieker had gouged me. The place beside my right brow was padded with gauze and tape. “Thanks?” I said.

“Your stuff’s over there.” She jutted her spade-shaped chin, also pierced, at a wooden dresser in the corner. My clothes were folded neatly on top, my cane lying horizontally over the stack. “But let’s get one thing straight. You were responsible for the strip tease, not me.”

Not knowing how to respond, I nodded meekly. I heard her resettle on the mattress.

“Hey, listen,” I said, shaking out my trousers and stepping into them. I’d already swapped the gray sock for my own. “Blade, right? Whatever I did last night, Blade, I’m really sorry. I’m not normally like that.”

I buckled up and patted my pockets, relieved to feel my wallet and keys. That didn’t always happen, either.

“I don’t know too many who are,” Blade said in a smoky voice. “You’re a real original.”

“What exactly did…? Forget it. I don’t want to know.”

She smiled mysteriously and propped her elbows behind her. “So, what’s your name?”

Inventing one felt like too much work. “Everson,” I replied.

“And where does Everson dwell?”

“West Village.” I jerked my head, though I had no idea which direction was which.

“Really?” Interest glinted in her dark eyes as she watched me configure my tie into a Windsor knot. “You strike me as, I don’t know, more Midtown. When you’re sober, anyway.”

“I actually—” A dreadful realization struck me. I grabbed my mechanical watch from the dresser and stared at its face. “Oh, crap.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I’m late.” I snatched up my coat and cane and made for the door.

“For what?” Blade was sitting up now, sheets pressed to her stark breastbone.

“My morning class.”

Her brow wrinkled. “You’re a student?”

“No,” I called back. “Professor.”

6

It was a quarter past eight when I slipped into the hallowed halls of Midtown College, the first classes of the day already underway.

I stopped off in the faculty bathroom upstairs, where I kept a spare toiletry bag, relieved to find the room empty. There hadn’t been time to go home, and I already knew by my reflection in the subway’s scratched-up window that I looked a wreck. The bathroom mirror confirmed this with even more candor.

In the space of a minute, I pulled a wet comb through my hair, washed my puffy face, and jagged a toothbrush around my mouth. I finished with a few drops of Visine in each eye. The demon gunk had evaporated from my coat, but the same couldn’t be said for the blood on my jacket collar. Rubbing it with a wet paper towel only smeared it around.

Maybe it was time to stow a spare set of clothes up here as well.

I arrived at my classroom to find Caroline Reid sitting at the head of the circular arrangement of desks, lecturing on something. Which was to say she was covering my ass again. She glanced over and caught me watching her through the door window. Her lips tensed into a smile that barely dimpled her cheeks and fell far short of her blue-green eyes.

Caroline was a brilliant scholar of urban history and affairs. Her classroom/office was adjacent to mine, which I think we both considered my blessing and her burden. More than once I’d entertained the thought of being more than friends, but I was smart enough to know that feeling wasn’t mutual. Besides, she was currently seeing some accountant stud—an oxymoron, I know.

Caroline stood and smoothed her coffee-brown slacks as I opened the door. “And with that, I’ll hand off to Professor Croft,” she announced.

“Much obliged, Professor Reid,” I said. “Truly.”

She looked over my stained and crumpled shirt as she approached, her own shirt a neat beige blouse, waves of golden hair shifting over the shoulders. I adjusted the knot of my tie, as if it made any difference.

“Heads up,” she whispered, when she’d drawn even. “Snodgrass is on the lookout for you again.”

My stomach sank at the mention of our department chairman, but I didn’t let it show.

“Appreciate the warning,” I whispered back. Her faint honey scent reminded me that for the last ten hours I’d inhaled nothing even remotely pleasant—and no doubt smelled the part.

“Just be careful,” she said.

“Will do. And hey, I owe you for…” I nodded toward the classroom.

“All right, but this is the last time.” She raised her slender eyebrows. “I’m serious.”

She’d been threatening to let me hang for more than a year now, but I didn’t dare point that out. Instead, I thanked her again, bowing slightly. She gave a final tight-lipped smile that said, You’re better than this, before stepping out. That stung. Of course she knew nothing about my second job and how close the greater East Village had come to being shrieker meat.

I exhaled as I closed the door behind her and cane-tapped toward my students.

All six of them.

In the wake of the Crash, graduate students were less willing to